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Karl Marx

An old man told me once “You are a successful man when you have good children, not when you just have physical possessions”. “He then defined the words “good children” by saying: “Good children are those who love God before anything else and respect their neighbors”. To me that was very profound and later, when I started reading the Bible, I realized that he had told me the two commandments that Jesus gave us in the New Testament, which include the 10 commandments of Moses, tacitly.
When I read, in the process of my life, so many good philosophers, moralists and historians I found a very cultured man who was not only that, but an economist and a sociologist and more, I expected to find a private man in the same level of success influencing his own family, but I saw the opposite. If you don’t believe it, see the proof in the next paragraphs written by another great man:

“Just as Darwin discovered the law of development or organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of development of human history: the simple fact, hitherto concealed by an overgrowth of ideology, that mankind must first of all eat, drink, have shelter and clothing, before it can pursue politics, science, art, religion, etc.; that therefore the production of the immediate material means, and consequently the degree of economic development attained by a given people or during a given epoch, form the foundation upon which the state institutions, the legal conceptions, art, and even the ideas on religion, of the people concerned have been evolved, and in the light of which they must, therefore, be explained, instead of vice versa, as had hitherto been the case. Marx also discovered the special law of motion governing the present-day capitalist mode of production and the bourgeois society that this mode of production has created”. Friederich Engels.

Marx became a member of the Young Hegelian movement. This group, which included the theologians Bruno Bauer and David Friedrich Strauss, produced a radical critique of Christianity.
Great ideas that even today are still studied by many and practiced by not so few in our present US government; however, let’s take a look at the next paragraph and realize what Karl Marx was NOT (a good father; a good provider), moreover look at the ironies of life revealed to us from the life of the offspring of this so admired individual:

“The Father of Modern Communism” also fathered 7 children, 4 of whom survived to adulthood. His only son, Frederic Demuth (1851-1929) was illegitimate; “Freddy’s” mother, Helen Demuth, was maidservant to Marx’s wife. Marx never acknowledged paternity, and it was not until 12 years after his death, when Frederic Engels lay on his death-bed, that it was revealed–by Engels, writing on a blackboard–that “Freddy is Marx’s son.”
Freddy became a skilled machinist and lived a quiet, decent, not particularly happy life. Physically, he resembled his father. He was a reserved, gentle man, dedicated to socialism but not to revolution.
Jenny (1844-1883), named after her mother, was her father’s favorite. She lived with her husband (a Socialist) and children in France, until she died of tuberculosis.
Laura (1846-1911) was quieter, more reliable than her 2 sisters; in this respect, she resembled her mother. She also married a French Socialist and had 3 children, all of whom died in their infancy. In her 65th year, she and her husband agreed they had nothing to live for and committed suicide.
Eleanor (1856-1898), Marx’s youngest daughter, was emotionally crippled by the excessive dominance of her father’s personality. “It is overmuch,” she wrote, “to have Karl as my father. I do not have my own life.” She did seem incapable of leading any sort of normal life, having inherited all her father’s worst qualities and little of her mother’s gentleness. She made political speeches, wrote some political propaganda, acted in amateur theatricals, edited her father’s posthumous papers, but she lacked self-discipline, was neurotic, and most of her efforts were abortive.
During her father’s lifetime, Eleanor was emotionally chained to him; after his death, she formed a similar relationship with her common-law husband, Edward Aveling. Aveling resembled her father in that he was learned, charming, brutally sarcastic, utterly unscrupulous, hot-tempered, and incapable of making a living. He was a Marxist 2nd, an opportunist and psychotic 1st. Eleanor supported him for 15 years until, at his suggestion, she committed suicide.
The various fates of Karl Marx’s progeny were so tragic that in 1898, near the end of her life, Eleanor wrote to her half-brother, “I don’t think you and I have been particularly bad people–and yet, dear Freddy, it really seems as though we are being punished.”